It’s slippery in here

Christopher Tayler

Twin Peaks: The Return created by Mark Frost and David Lynch
Showtime/Sky Atlantic, 18 episodes, 21 May-3 September

James Joyce resented the Second World War for distracting readers from the newly published Finnegans Wake, and what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf of Mark Frost and David Lynch, about the news environment that accompanied the broadcast of Twin Peaks: The Return. I say ‘on behalf of’ because I imagine that Lynch couldn’t care less. ‘It’s good to kind of go along with your life,’ he told Entertainment Weekly in May as the first episodes went out, adding that he had spent the première ‘in my woodshop’, working on a table to have at his side while eating Parmesan crackers or practising transcendental meditation. At first glance the new series was just as disconnected from public concerns. James Comey and Robert Mueller might be on people’s minds, but on Twin Peaks the salient FBI boss is still Gordon Cole, a hearing-impaired, gee-whizzily cryptic character played by Lynch himself. We first caught up with him in a conference room, where a subordinate showed him a sequence of bizarre and scary images, and Lynch squawked, a bit ingenuously: ‘What the hell?’

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